|
The name used by Microsoft to describe its
latest strategy for integrating mainstream computing with the web. Aware
that the lifespan of windows is limited, the company is developing a
new range of technologies based on web services, which it hopes will
become the standards for a new generation of business applications that can
talk to each other regardless of their origin or the underlying systems
software. In this new world, the operating system in use on a user's
computer is irrelevant; as long as it is equipped with a suitably up-to-date
browser and the standard web services protocols, any device (
including a pda or a mobile phone, for example) can use software of many
kinds that is written to .NET standards
Unsurprisingly, not
everyone believes that .NET is the answer to the peculiar set of
problems being created by the internet. sun Microsystems's Java
technology, in particular J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition), is still being
pushed as a better way of creating web services, for example. Although the
two technologies are theoretically based on the same underlying standards
and should therefore be interoperable, sun has somewhat predictably accused
Microsoft of creating yet more proprietary software as part of an attempt to
lock people into one way of doing things. Microsoft for its part says more
or less the same thing about J2EE.
Although much of the hard work involved in creating .NET
revolves around existing technologies such as xml, it
nonetheless represents a major overhaul in terms of sheer engineering, and
Microsoft expects the emergence of the complete specification to take some
years. Windows xp, the latest version of its operating system, includes a
subset of .net features. Ironically, some of the ideas it
encapsulates are closer in spirit to those proposed for the network
computer by Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive, in the mid-1990s
than they are to the windows model so success fully marketed by Bill Gates. |
